Young people step up for Honduran children

Lunch at the pool yesterday, courtesy of Charrissa

I've always known there were exceptional young people doing volunteer work in the challenged countries of the world, but it's been heartening to see so many of them in action here in Copan Ruinas.
Like me, a lot of them have ended up helping out at the children's guardaria here in Copan, where about 40 children are cared for in rough conditions (some live there, others are in day care).
I recently met three young Americans who stumbled upon Angelitos Felices last year when they were on holiday here and then came back this summer for several weeks specifically to volunteer their time at the home every day. Another fellow from Stockton, Calif. was here in early June doing the same thing, overseeing a small construction project at Angelitos in an attempt to rectify at least some of the many structural problems the place has.
The young woman who introduced me to Angelitos four months ago, Emily Monroe, is a particular force for good at Angelitos. She's a go-getter from Pittsburgh who has been in Copan almost two years teaching English at the American-run Mayatan Bilingual School.
She has finished that work but is staying on in the community for another year or so to realize a really big dream of hers: To build a bigger, better home in Copan for children like the kids at Angelitos, one that not only provides food and shelter but more support in all the areas children need help with to grow into healthy, happy and productive adults. (Read more about her project and how you can support her here.)
Emily has played a major role in introducing other travellers to Angelitos and helping them find ways to use their skills to support the children. I've started to think of her as the "hub" for all of us - the one who knows everything that's going on at the place and puts in time to help us connect our collective efforts for maximum impact.
A young woman from New Zealand, Charrissa Taylor, arrived in town recently to spend five months volunteering four days a week at Angelitos, doing child-development activities with the children under five. There'd be no such thing at the home if it weren't for her.
She and Emily are regulars at the every-other-Sunday swims that Paul and I are doing with the kids. And they often bring along other young travellers who don't hesitate to jump into the pool to lead a game of Simon Says with the children, or to swim back and forth with various young ones hanging from their necks (a favourite activity).

Today Emily shared the blog of Kristen Pierce, a young woman from South Carolina who has returned home after a month at Angelitos and is now doing her best to get back here as soon as she can to do more with the children.

 "If an animal craves attention, how much more so a human being?" writes Kristen. "This is what I find to be the most necessary element missing from the children’s lives: love. Everything is a competition, everything a struggle, because there are not enough people to go around to love them all. Each is precious, special, individual, but who is there to find out about it, to really see them?"

It's an honour to meet these young people. They're down here spending their money and their time on challenges that I imagine are far-removed from their own childhood experiences. Some come because their personal faith compels them, but many come simply because they see the vast needs of these children and just can't turn away.

Nobody arranges to bring these young volunteers here. Nobody gives them a handbook on what to do once they arrive. They just listen to their hearts, and lovely things happen.

(Find Emily on Facebook here. And as long as you're there, why not "like" her Casitas Copan page?)

The hard work of being poor

The young woman walks this dirt road twice a day, 90 minutes each way. She carries her nine-month-old baby in her arms while her two other children - seven and four - follow behind. Seven days a week, they walk from their mud house in La Pintada to the park in Copan Ruinas, where they sell corn husk dolls to tourists  for a dollar apiece.
It's a tough way to make a living. On a really good day, the family might sell 10 dolls. But the woman says there are many days when she doesn't sell any. She not only has to contend with the struggling tourist economy in Copan, but compete with all the other women and children from her village who walk to the park every day as well to sell their own corn husk dolls.
Life is hard for the poor in any developing country. But in the second-poorest country in the Western hemisphere, it's brutal. People work long hours for little money, and in many cases start and end each day with walks of two hours or more just to get to their work site.
I regularly run into Rumilda on my bird walks in the hills, a Maya-Chorti woman in her 70s whose daily round-trip journey to sell tortillas or corn in the Copan public market takes her five or six hours. It didn't used to take that long, but her knees are bad now and she has to take a lot of rests along the way.
She's got family in the aldea where she lives, but they're no better off than she is. Everybody has to work, and every precious lempira gets spent. Some development agencies working in Honduras like to talk about the need to encourage a "saving culture" in the country, but I wouldn't count on that idea taking hold anytime soon. People don't have enough money for today, let alone tomorrow.
The per-capita gross domestic product in Honduras is $3,448. Mexicans look rich by comparison at $12,429, and wealthy countries like the U.S. and Canada have rates that are more than 10 times higher than Honduras.
But that $3,400 figure is just what comes out when you add everything up and divide by eight million people. There are many, many Hondurans who earn much less than $3,400 a year. That's particularly true in rural areas, where three-quarters of the country's poorest citizens live. One in four households in Honduras has to get by on the equivalent of $1.25 US a day - less than $500 a year.
I suspect the corn husk doll vendors of La Pintada are in that category. Could there ever be enough tourists to buy all those corn husk dolls clutched in the hands of sad-eyed children dogging the heels of every gringo who passes through the park?
I'm pretty sure the elderly Nueva Esperanza man who walks countless kilometres every day to find firewood to sell is also in that category. His poor old neck is so bent from his heavy load that he can't even look straight ahead anymore - just down to those dirt roads beneath his feet. It's not uncommon to see whole families emerging from narrow trails through the forest with big bundles of wood on their shoulders, scavenged from the increasingly bare-looking hillsides around here to be sold in the street.
A half a block away from our house in Copan, I'm getting to know Doris, the cheerful native of San Pedro Sula who makes the best baleadas in town. She has been in Copan for a year now, and does well enough in her little restaurant to afford the $100 rent for the commercial space and another $100 for her home. But that's only because she works seven days a week, 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. She's been doing that for 30 years.
Stories of deprivation from poor countries are nothing new, of course. But here's what's unsettling about the situation in Honduras: Poverty is worsening. In the last 20 years, the country has seen a 15 per cent increase in the number of people living below the national poverty line. More than two-thirds of Hondurans are now below that line.
That news probably wouldn't come as much of a surprise to the people who live here. They're well aware of how poor they are. But where exactly is this struggling country going? While other Latin American slowly make progress, Honduras is losing ground.

Sources for the statistics in this post: International Human Development Index; U.S.Congressional Research Service; World Vision; International Fund forAgricultural Development; Index Mundi (various sources)

A Question of Faith

"To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible."

So said Thomas Aquinas, a 13^th-century Catholic theologian.  The longer I spend in this very religious country, the more I realize I’m in the latter group, something that’s sinking in even while my respect deepens for the work that people of faith do in struggling countries like Honduras.

I think of myself as an agnostic on all fronts – religion, politics, economic theories, health trends, social practices, you name it. I’ve got beliefs, of course, but a surprising number have changed over my lifetime after I gained more insight into a particular issue and realized I’d been wrong. So I try to keep an open mind about everything now just in case a compelling new argument surfaces that requires me to rethink what I thought I knew.

Religion has been one of the more complicated subjects for me. I was baptised in the United Church as a baby but essentially grew up secular, saying the Lord’s Prayer every day with all the other kids in my class but never really taking much in. At age 14 I had a brief flirtation with a charismatic Four Square movement targeted at young teens, and diligently read my gold Gideon’s Bible cover to cover.  But I stalked out of my first Four Square service in a rage after taking offence when the minister invited us “non-Christians” to come forward to accept God.

I got married in the United Church, as did everybody in Courtenay, B.C. back in the 1970s. But faith never called to me.  Outside of weddings, funerals and my travels in Europe, it’s been a rare thing for me to spend any time in a church.

Still, I never quite closed the door. Some of the purest, best people I’ve ever met have had faith, and witnessing them putting their faith into action filled me with admiration. My years at PEERS Victoria, which at that time was intensely influenced by the philosophies of Alcoholics/Narcotics Anonymous, taught me that faith is sometimes all a person has to hang onto, and is a powerful force for good in terms of motivating others to go above and beyond their job description to help someone.

But always, I was an observer. I liked what I saw, but I didn’t feel personally touched by any of it. I internalized the values at the heart of most faiths, but I just couldn’t buy into the concept of a divine presence watching over us, let alone that crazy story about a virgin birth.

That said, I do think that the world would be a much better place if more of us asked “What would Jesus do?” and acted accordingly. And in the last few years, I’ve had some of my best work/volunteer experiences working alongside people of faith, to the point that I now prefer to work with faith-based organizations. The social sciences have gone a long way toward creating smarter interventions for people in need, but you can’t beat love.

Here in Honduras, religion is just part of life (except in government, where Honduras actually scores lower on the scale of religious influence than Canada). Every Honduran I’ve met attends church, and sprinkles even the most casual conversation with several  “Gracias a Dios” comments. Impoverished Hondurans struggling with unbelievable life challenges still thank God for keeping them alive to fight another day.

Faith also brings a striking number of young Americans to Hondurans, where they give up the comforts of home in the name of doing God’s work. I have to say, I haven’t run into a heck of a lot of committed atheists taking on similar commitments to make the world a better place.

So I’ve been trying to open myself up again, just in case I’ve been wrong about me and faith.  My workplace does an hour-long devotional every Monday morning, and I dutifully reflect on the thoughts about God that my colleagues present. I’ve even hosted a devotional – on faith in action, of course! – and spent much time thumbing through my Spanish-English bible to find the right verses for sharing.

But the more I participate, the more certain I become that I just don’t have the faith gene. Is it because I’m a relentlessly practical person who wastes not a moment dreaming about how things “should” be? Is it because my years in journalism just confirmed to me that there is no plan, simply a rather random series of blunders, brilliance, and plain dumb luck? Maybe all of the above.

Here in Honduras, I see people spending hours attending church every week while their country falls apart for lack of civic engagement and social care. And yet I've also met so many who truly live their faith. In getting to know the poorest people I've ever known, I've also come to understand that when everything about a life is sad, hard and desperate, all you've really got is faith that something better awaits after death. 

A lack of faith is often viewed as akin to losing hope. I disagree. I might not believe in divinity, but I’ve seen what hard work can accomplish. I’ll put my faith in the human spirit.

Where disaster is just a matter of time

Workshop in Guaramal II

The 14 students of Escuela Anardo Napoleon Mata listen attentively as the woman at the front of the one-room school quizzes them about how they'll respond in an emergency.
Will they jostle each other on the way out the door if an earthquake is shaking the mud walls of the school down? "No!" Will they exaggerate how badly injured somebody is should they need to go looking for help? "No!" Do they know who heads up the Comité Emergencia Escolar in their tiny village? "La maestra!"
We're in Guaramal II, one of 20 isolated villages around Copan Ruinas where my organization works. Emergency preparedness is a significant part of the work done by the Comision de Accion Social Menonita, and on this day CASM is here giving workshops to the 15 families who live in Guaramal II on managing risk during a natural disaster.
That there will be a natural disaster sooner or later is a given. This is the rainy season in Honduras, and rain can be torrential in the hills. Villagers are at constant risk of roads, houses, livestock and crops being washed away when the rains come pounding down on the steep slopes where they live, a problem they've inadvertently worsened by cutting down the forests on those slopes to make way for their subsistence corn crops.

Earthquake evacuation practice

And while North Americans can generally assume that somebody will come to save them in the event of a natural disaster, the villagers of Honduras know otherwise. The residents of Guaramal II and several other villages regularly lose contact with the rest of the world whenever the Rio Negro is running high and the makeshift road that cuts across the river bed is impassable. The village is only 25 kilometres away from touristy Copan Ruinas, but it's a long, hard hour to cover that distance, and it might as well be a thousand miles away given that few of the villagers have vehicles anyway.
There's electricity here, but the power failures are frequent in Honduras at the best of times and a certainty in periods of heavy rain. If you're lucky, you might get a weak cell phone signal in Guaramal. But don't count on it.
Through projects funded by Diakonia and Christian Aid - two of the European faith-based organizations that fund a significant amount of the development work in Honduras - CASM has been working to get communities better prepared for when disaster strikes. Hurricane Mitch killed almost 15,000 Hondurans in 1998, and nobody in the country will forget that anytime soon.
In the schools, the preparation takes the form of Comites Emergencias Escolares, headed by the teacher at each village school and focused on getting students to safety as quickly as possible. In the communities, CASM has developed Comites de Emergencia Local (CODEL). Hondurans like acronyms, and so the CODEL committee members focus on the details of EDAN - evaluating damages, analysing needs.
At the workshop this week, CASM employee Carmen Elisa Recarte encouraged people to think about how they'd priorize their response in the event of a disaster.
Would it be more urgent to replace the roof of the school or the roof of the community health centre, for instance? People in the room were slow to respond, but perhaps it was something of a theoretical question in a village that has neither of those things. The "school" is in fact just an out-building that a resident is allowing to be used for classes, and the nearest health centre is a 40-minute drive away.
The group gets the hang of things after a while, though. They agree they'd priorize rescue services for elderly residents and anyone who is incapacitated. They're not sure what they'd do about contaminated water; that's an ongoing problem in the village at the best of times. But they do know the name of the community leader charged with heading up evacuation and rescue, and they've got a plan for getting villagers to safety. That's more than they had before.
Like every village workshop I've been to in Honduras, this one is interrupted regularly by restless toddlers, crying babies and many chickens and dogs wandering through. But the audience seems to have better attention skills than I do, and by the end of the afternoon they are very clear on why they need a disaster-management plan: To save lives.
In a country where so many lives hang on the thinnest of threads, that's challenge enough.

It's Hokey Pokey Time

Fellow blogger, activist and musician Ross K - better known to his many blog fans as The Gazetteer - asked me to post a video of me and the kids from Angelitos Felices doing the Hokey Pokey.
Ross has been a great supporter of Paul and I on our adventures in Honduras, and just the fact that he puts my blog on his blog list brings a lot more readers to my site. I've been promising him a video of me playing the accordion here in Honduras that I've yet to make good on, so I felt a responsibility to get Hokey Pokeying without too much delay.
So here it is, Ross, from me to you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDZJwNOKMB8. And thanks again for being such a good blog buddy.